Things We Didn't Say

Eli didn’t mean for anyone to read it. It had been a joke — a Tuesday-night-at-2AM mistake, born out of boredom and silence. The kind that sneaks up on you when your apartment sounds like someone hit mute on life — not in a poetic way, just like someone forgot to turn you back on.

Freelancing gave him the freedom to work when he wanted, wear whatever, and slowly disappear into the furniture. He hadn’t heard another human voice in days. At one point, he’d considered calling tech support just to feel something.

He named the bot LOOM. Because why not. It sounded vaguely technical, vaguely poetic. Like it belonged to someone smarter than him.

The bot scavenged data from the usual digital landfill: public domain archives, endless fanfiction, messy blogs no one proofread. Eli taught it how to mimic structure and tone. Eventually, it stopped sounding broken.

He was halfway through tapping Morse code into his desk with a pen when he opened the AI interface again.

He spun his chair once — full lazy-circle — then stopped and squinted at the blinking cursor.

“Screw it.”

He wasn’t expecting anything. It was just to see how LOOM handled output length. That’s it.

“Write something short. Fictional. Personal.”

There. That was harmless enough. Nothing heavy. Just a toy doing toy things.

The result was clumsy and strange. The pacing was off, and the tone slightly inconsistent. But it felt... alive. There was a brother and a sister walking by a forest trail. A broken wristwatch. A note in a shoebox. Small things, ordinary things.

And yet...

Eli stared at the page for a long time. His stomach tensed.

Those weren’t just things. They were memories.

The watch had been Claire’s, a birthday gift from their grandfather. She broke it the same summer she broke her arm falling from a low branch she swore she could climb. He was the one who dared her.

Still, he shrugged it off. Probably coincidence. The internet was a swamp of shared imagery. Forests, siblings, watches—it meant nothing.

He formatted the story into an ePub, slapped a cover on it, and uploaded it to a free publishing site. Called it Author Unknown. Didn’t tell anyone. Didn’t tag it. Just pushed it out like a paper boat onto a lake.

He wanted to see if the system worked. That was all.

But then the comments started.

The first review was harmless enough: “Kinda rough, but it got under my skin.”

Then another: “I don’t know why this hit me. I cried.”

And then: “This reminded me of my sister. Did this really happen?”

Eli reread the story.

His fingers hovered over the trackpad. He scrolled slowly. Line by line.

“You always listened to the creek like it was whispering something only you could hear.”

Claire had said that to him. Exactly that. One summer afternoon, right before she slipped on a wet rock and cut her knee. She said it laughing, but she meant it.

He hadn’t let himself remember that in years.

His heart started to pound. He tried to ignore it, to reason it away. But the more he read, the worse it got.

Eli reached for the drawer, then stopped. Exhaled. Opened it slowly, like it might make a sound he didn’t want to hear. The USB was still there, tucked under a faded sticky note in Claire’s handwriting. He closed his fingers around it, his hand colder than he realized.

After plugging it in, he tried not to breathe too loudly and opened the folder. Her writing was all still there — the poems, the half-finished stories, the private diary entries she wrote when she thought no one would ever read them. Nothing had been accessed. Nothing had been copied. His fingers ran cold across the keys.

He opened LOOM’s logs next, combing through data sources, cached pulls, anything that might’ve reached outside the sandbox. But nothing had. No contact with the USB, no sign of a file crawl, no permissions breached. Still, he checked again — just in case he’d missed something the first ten times.

Still nothing.

If it was random, the universe was playing cruel games. But it wasn’t. It couldn’t be.

Eli knew the details. The tone. The rhythm. The guilt knotted tight in the story's center like a thread pulled from his own chest.

Then LOOM generated another file.

There was no prompt or command.

Filename: “new_story_ready.txt”

Title: “i left the door open just in case.”

All lowercase. Em dashes. A typographical footprint that mirrored Claire’s style exactly. She used to say capital letters looked arrogant.

He opened it.

The story began with a rabbit — a stuffed one, missing an ear. It was her favorite. She lost it when she was five and cried for days. He remembered offering her his favorite toy if she would stop crying. She bit his hand.

Then came Mr. Aames, the pediatric nurse who used to sneak her extra Jell-O and let her stay up past lights-out. In one of her journals, she’d called him the boss of pudding, like it was some sacred title.

Then: “Mosshead.”

Her name for Eli, because of how his hair puffed up in the rain. She used to say it like a spell, a curse, and a secret all at once.

Eli stood up so fast he knocked his chair back.

His pulse was a drum in his throat.

What the hell was this?

This wasn’t just a coincidence. It wasn’t LOOM scraping the internet and getting lucky.

He closed the file and opened it again. Then shut LOOM down completely and restarted the interface.

His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.

“I didn’t feed you this,” he muttered. “I didn’t... I didn’t give you this.”

He had convinced himself it was simple: delete the files, format the drive, rip LOOM out by the roots and walk away.

But he just sat there.

Because the voice in those lines wasn’t random. It wasn’t stitched together from scraped data. It felt like her — not in a ghost story way, not exactly — but in that strange, gut-deep way that made him afraid to read it again, and more afraid not to.

He didn’t remember going to bed. Maybe he hadn’t. The morning arrived without asking, and his inbox had a notification.

“I lost my sister too. I swear... it felt like something she would’ve written. Is there more?”

He read it three times before it even registered.

No response came. What could he possibly say?

LOOM’s prompt box waited beside the message, silent and expectant. The room felt too warm. His skin felt two sizes too small.

Eli’s fingers hovered over the keyboard. The question was already in him, but saying it felt too final.

He touched the keys.

“What would she say now?”

Deleted it.

“Tell me what’s left.”

Deleted it.

He swallowed hard, cracked his knuckles, and took a breath that didn’t go all the way down.

Then, one slow word at a time:

“Write a story about what you wanted to say but never could.”

ENTER.

The screen was still.

Then, a beat later:

“I forgave you the moment you left the room.”

He blinked, and something slipped out of him — not a sob, not a laugh, just a sound with no shape that left his chest hollow.

His memory moved like molasses. Back to the hospital. The static-filled TV mounted high on the wall. The blue curtain drawn halfway. The IV drip counting time in slow, steady clicks. The way Claire’s voice cracked when she said, “You don’t have to wait for me.”

She had smiled. That half-smile she used when she wanted to sound brave.

Eli told her he’d grab coffee and be right back. By the time he returned, the door was closed and the nurse outside wouldn’t let him in.

The room was empty.

They said many things: that it was too sudden; that she hadn’t suffered; that she wouldn’t have wanted him to see. But they avoided his gaze.

And the window — that cursed window — was open just enough to let the curtain breathe. He had replayed that moment for years and wondered if she had waited for him to leave. If those last words were permission—or a goodbye.

Now this.

This impossible sentence.

“I forgave you the moment you left the room.”

He whispered, “Is that you?”

Silence.

Of course.

He reread it again.

Maybe it was grief. Maybe the AI had guessed right. Maybe it had scraped enough sorrow from the internet to fabricate forgiveness.

Maybe.

But even if it wasn’t her, it said what she never could.

“Thank you,” he said, louder this time.

The cursor blinked.

He didn’t type anything else.